From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A. Tucker  

Brownstone Institute has been tracking a little-known federal agency for years. It is part of the Department of Homeland Security created after 9-11. It is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. It was created in 2018 out of a 2017 executive order that seemed to make sense. It was a mandate to secure American digital infrastructure against foreign attack and infiltration.

And yet during the Covid year, it assumed three huge jobs. It was the agency responsible for dividing the workforce between essential and nonessential. It led the way on censorship efforts. And it handled election security for 2020 and 2022, which, if you understand the implications of that, should make you spit out your coffee upon learning.

More than any other agency, it became the operationally relevant government during this period. It was the agency that worked through third parties and packet-switching networking to take down your Facebook group. It worked through all kinds of intermediaries to keep a lid on Twitter. It managed LinkedIn, Instagram, and most of the other mainstream platforms in a way that made you feel like your opinions were too crazy to see the light of day.

The most astonishing court document just came out. It was unearthed in the course of litigation undertaken by America First Legal. It has no redaction. It is a reverse chronicle of most of what they did from February 2020 until last year. It is 500 pages long. The version available now takes an age to download, so we shrunk it and put it on fast view so you can see the entire thing.

What you discover is this. Everything that the intelligence agencies did not like during this period – doubting lockdowns, dismissing masking, questioning the vaccine, and so on – was targeted through a variety of cutouts among NGOs, universities, and private-sector fact-checkers. It was all labeled as Russian and Chinese propaganda so as to fit in with CISA’s mandate. Then it was throttled and taken down. It managed remarkable feats such as getting WhatsApp to stop allowing bulk sharing.

It gets crazier. CISA documented that it deprecated the study of Jay Bhattacharya from May 2020 that showed that Covid was far more widespread and less dangerous than the CDC was claiming, thus driving down the Infection Fatality Rate within the range of a bad flu. This was at a time when it was widely assumed to be the black death. CISA weighed in to say that the study was faulty and tore down posts about it.

The granularity of their work is shocking, naming Epoch Times, Unz.org, and a whole series of websites as disinformation, often with a crazy spin that identified them with Russian propaganda, white supremacy, terrorist activity, or some such. Reading through the document conjures up memories of Lenin and Stalin smearing the Kulaks or Hitler on the Jews. Everything that is contrary to government claims becomes foreign infiltration or insurrectionist or otherwise seditious.

It’s a very strange world these people inhabit. Over time, of course, the agency ended up demonizing much authentic science plus a majority of public opinion. And yet they stayed at it, fully convinced of the rightness of their cause and the justness of their methods. It seems never to have occurred to this agency that we have a First Amendment that is part of our laws. It never enters the discussion at all.

AFL summarizes the document as follows.

• CISA’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF) relied on the Censorship Industrial Complex to inform its censorship of alleged foreign disinformation narratives regarding COVID-19.

• Unelected bureaucrats at CISA weaponized the homeland security apparatus, including FEMA, to monitor COVID-19 speech dissenting from “expert” medical guidance, including President Trump’s comments about taking Hydroxychloroquine in 2020. Many of these “false” narratives later turned out to be true, calling into question the government’s ability to identify “misinformation,” regardless of its authority to do so.
• To determine what was “foreign disinformation,” CISA relied on the Censorship Industrial Complex’s usual suspects (Atlantic Council DFR Lab, Media Matters, Stanford Internet Observatory) — even those discredited for erroneously attributing domestic content to foreign sources (Alliance for Securing Democracy). CISA even relied on foreign government authorities (EU vs. Disinfo) and foreign government-linked groups (CCDH, GDI) that advocated for the demonetization and deplatforming of individual Americans to monitor and target constitutionally protected speech by American citizens.

For years, this story of censorship has unfolded in shocking ways. This document among tens of thousands of pages is surely among the most incriminating. And discussing it is apparently still taboo because the Subcommittee report on Covid never once mentions CISA. Why might that be?

In the strange world of D.C., CISA might be considered untouchable because it was staffed out of the National Security Agency which itself is a spinoff of the Central Intelligence Agency. Thus does its activities generally fall under the category of classified. And its many functioning assets in the civilian sector are legally bound to keep their relationships and connections private.

Thank goodness at least one judge believed otherwise and forced the agency to cough it up.

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

From the Brownstone Institute

By  Robert Kogon 

So, who exactly is Wei Cai, the scientific staff member of Germany’s public health authority, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), who, as revealed in hitherto hidden minutes of the institute’s “COVID-19 Crisis Group,” comes from none other than Wuhan? And when I say “hitherto hidden minutes,” I mean hidden precisely in the ostensible leak of the unredacted “RKI Files.” For, as I discussed in a recent article, the file in question was not included among the supposedly “complete minutes” assembled by Aya Velazquez, the prostitute-turned-journalist and anti-Covid-measure activist who unveiled the documents at a highly-publicized press conference in Berlin on July 23rd.

As discussed in a postscript to that article, although I have asked her, I have not received a coherent answer from Velazquez as to how she could have overlooked these minutes, which are indeed the minutes of the very first RKI “crisis group” meeting of which we have a public record.

Be that as it may, the reason why the revelation of the RKI’s link to Wuhan is important – and why German authorities may have preferred that it remain secret – is because, as I have documented in, among other places, my ‘The Greatest Story Never Told,’ Germany in fact had a very active publicly-funded research partnership in virology with several research institutions in Wuhan, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Indeed, the German-Chinese virology network, known as the “Sino-German Transregional Collaborative Research Centre” or TRR60, gave rise to a full-fledged German-Chinese virology lab, not only right in Wuhan but indeed right in what is regarded as the area of the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in the city. For this and other (microbiological) reasons outlined in my ‘The Smoking Gun in Wuhan,’ the members of the German-Chinese virology partnership ought to be prime suspects in any genuine investigation into a possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2.  But, instead, they have been completely ignored in favour of suspects in far-off places like Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

The below photo shows various members of the partnership, as well as associated German and Chinese luminaries in the field of virology. It was taken in 2015 at a “Sino-German Symposium on Infectious Diseases” in Berlin organised by the German Co-Director of TRR60, Ulf Dittmer. Dittmer is the bald man in the middle of the picture. None other than Christian Drosten, the German designer of the ‘gold standard’ SARS-CoV-2 PCR test, and Shi Zhengli, the WIV’s renowned bat coronavirus expert, can be seen together in the lower left-hand corner of the picture.

Other notables include Chen Xinwen, the then-director of the WIV. Chen is the small, somewhat buck-toothed man in the lower right-hand corner. He was a member of TRR60. The young woman with the long hair next to Shi Zhengli appears to be the current Director of the WIV, Wang Yanyi. The former President of the Robert Koch Institute, Reinhard Burger, is also in the picture. He is the white-haired man with the blue shirt near the centre of the group.

Given the WIV’s famed practice of gain-of-function research, it is worth noting that this get-together took place precisely during the American moratorium on such research. It is also worth noting that Christian Drosten himself, as touched upon in my ‘The Greatest Story‘, has coordinated a German research project on the MERS coronavirus involving gain-of-function experiments. Indeed, that ‘RAPID’ project got underway just two years after the Berlin get-together and likewise while the American moratorium still remained in place.

So, did Wei Cai have anything to do with the German-Chinese virology network? Well, yes, from her publications, we know that she did. Thus, she is a co-author with Michael Roggendorf of this 2013 paper on PCR detection of Hepatitis and HIV infections. Roggendorf is none other than the founder of the German-Chinese partnership. He is the white-haired man with the red bowtie next to RKI president Burger in the above photo. The former Chair of the Department of Virology at Essen University Hospital, he would cede his position as German Co-Director of TRR60 to his colleague Dittmer in 2013. Essen University Hospital is the lead German institution in the German-Chinese virology partnership.

Roggendorf can be seen below receiving the “Chime Bell” award from the Governor of Hubei Province in 2016 in honor of his contributions to the German-Chinese partnership. Wuhan is the capital of Hubei Province.

In early 2020, Wei Cai would then appear as co-author with Christian Drosten on a paper about the famous first cluster of Covid-19 cases in Germany. As discussed in my series of articles here, here, and here, it was precisely this cluster that first raised the spectre of ‘asymptomatic spread’ of Covid-19, even though – contrary to what was claimed by Drosten and other German authors in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine – Patient Zero was not in fact asymptomatic and none of the members of the cluster appear to have been particularly ill.

As touched upon in my previous article, Wei Cai would then go on to complete a PhD in Medicine at Drosten’s Charité University Hospital in Berlin, although under the direction of her supervisor in the Infectious Diseases Unit of the RKI, Walter Haas. Per her Linked-In page (hat-tip: FrauHodl), she completed a first degree in medicine at the Hubei University of Chinese Medicine in Wuhan in 2000 before going to Germany to do a master’s in public health in Bremen.

It should be noted that Wei Cai is an epidemiologist, not a virologist. Hence, she would not have been involved in the sort of laboratory experimentation on viruses that was being conducted under the aegis of TRR60 in Wuhan.

Nonetheless, the questions remain. Why was the very existence of the RKI’s staff member from Wuhan redacted in the original official release of the “RKI Files?” Why were the minutes in question, now unredacted and revealing her existence, hidden in the ostensible leak, as if the leakers were somehow sensitive to the Government’s concerns? And why, finally, do German – unlike American – links to Wuhan appear to be off-limits for German media, both traditional and new? Why the omertà?

Republished from The Daily Sceptic